Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

“Hope you don’t mind if I ride with you,” Jack said as he painfully pulled himself in, his arm aching and his legs wobbly from the unaccustomed bike ride. He nestled himself in a corner, beside a water tank that fed a plastic hose into the pen. “I promise that at least one of us is going to give those guys indigestion before lunchtime.”

By the time Jack and his team hit the island, everyone was gone.

They came at it hard, at three in the morning, Tony Antiniori commandeering the Sea Wrighter as three of their friends-all ex-military, faces painted, weapons in hand-jumped onto the now empty dock and charged up the ramp toward the concourse.

Despite Jack’s loss of blood, Tony had used his skills as a medic to do a quick patch job and get him back on his feet. But as he headed out after the others, Tony held him back.

“I don’t think so, buddy. Leave this to us.”

“Try and stop me,” Jack said.

Tony sighed and backed off.

Then Jack was off the boat and pounding up the ramp, a borrowed Colt AR-15 assault rifle in hand, moving with the others like commandos on a village raid. Even though Jack knew the exercise was probably futile he had to try, had to see if by some miracle Sara was still here, maybe tied up in a room somewhere, maybe in the foghorn building.

They covered the entire compound in less than ten minutes, crashing through doors, moving from room to room in the old Victorian, finding nothing but the mess left behind by Soren and his band of madmen, and the remnants of the fight in the dining room.

Jack took the winding stairs up to the lighthouse and scanned the concourse below, then the bay itself, looking for any signs of a body on the surface. His wound opened again but he didn’t care. His heart was stuck in his throat as his light played across the water. He was relieved when he saw nothing but the black water lit by the sinking moon.

Tony clambered up the stairs behind him. He stared out as well.

“They probably took her to use as a hostage,” Tony said. “You’ve proved pretty resilient-and they know you got away.”

“Yeah,” Jack said.

He hoped that Tony was right.

“Come on,” Tony said, urging him back down the stairs.

Jack followed docilely.

Jack thought about that last look she’d given him, that cold, unflinching gaze, the one that said she was prepared to deal with whatever came next, that she could take care of herself. But try as he might, he could not quite forgive himself for doing as she’d asked.

A mix of dread and anger sluiced through his body as he walked back past the lighthouse tower, clutching the AR-15. The woman he loved, the city he cherished, both at risk thanks to a man he loathed. It was an emotional cocktail that sharpened his focus to a razor edge.

As they exited the lighthouse they encountered a wiry former Navy SEAL who came jogging toward them.

“It’s all clear,” said Jonah Goldman. “Nobody on-site.”

Tony nodded. Jack was looking out at the bay.

“She’s not out there,” he said. “You’ve got to believe that.”

Jack sucked down a long, slow, tremulous breath.

“Now it’s time to go,” Tony said.

They hustled back to the boat, Jack lagging, Tony running watchfully at his side. The long night and loss of blood were conspiring against him.

The world turned and he dropped straight down as they reached the dock.

When Jack woke the sun was shining through a porthole. He was lying in his cabin, Eddie snuggled next to him.

Jack was instantly alert-and angry. He had passed out and they’d let him stay passed out. He swiveled his head and found Maxine sitting in a chair across from the bed. He was surprised to see her.

“How long have I been out?” he asked.

“Couple of hours,” she said. “They kept you sedated so they could deal with this.”

She held up a small bottle containing a nugget of metal-the bullet Tony had dug out of Jack’s shoulder sometime in the middle of the night. “No permanent damage, but it seems you’ve gotten yourself in pretty deep.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Jack sighed.

“So tell me.”

He did as he tried to overcome the lingering effects of whatever they’d pumped into his veins. He told her about the trip to Tel Aviv, the tense moment at Ben Gurion International, the near-miss with Hassan Haddad, breaking into Abdal al-Fida’s apartment, the encounter with Swain and his magic wand, the deaths of Brendan and the others, the e-mails Alain had discovered, Lawrence Soren and the firefight on the island… But mostly he talked about Sara, because it was his only way of hanging on to her right now.

“I shouldn’t have left her on that island,” he said.

“What choice did you have?”

“The one I didn’t take.”

“The one where you wind up dead?”

“Might be better than this,” he said bitterly.

“Uh-huh,” Max said. “And if this Swain guy is using her for leverage, then it seems to me you may have saved both of your lives by getting away.” She paused. “But more importantly, we are facing very organized, very powerful, very well connected megalomaniacs who are planning something bad. Stopping them is more important than anything else.”

“What are you saying?”

She leaned toward him now, her expression intense. “I want to help you, Jack. We all want to help you find Sara. But even more, we want to help our country. That gala starts in a little less than six hours and we need to do everything in our power to keep those bastards from blowing the place up.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?”

“Teamwork,” Max said. “Teamwork and a whole hell of a lot of luck.”

They had turned the salon and pilothouse of the Sea Wrighter into a makeshift command center, reminding Jack of the apartment house in Paris. The Sea Wrighter itself was anchored in the middle of the bay, away from prying eyes and ears, and who knew what else. If they were going to make some kind of move, it had to be done with the greatest of stealth.

Three of Tony’s buddies were here, the same three who had helped them assault the island. Jack had met them over the months in various bars that he and Tony frequented around town, old hardened war vets who still remembered what it meant to fight for your country. Back in the days when the bad guys were easier to spot and you knew who your friends were by the uniform they wore.

Now those uniforms had been replaced by street clothes, and you never knew who might be hiding behind a simple T-shirt and a pair of jeans. And thanks to fascists like Lawrence Soren and the people he bankrolled, there was no way to know when a look of concern or surprise was genuine, or merely a facade designed to manipulate and deceive.

But like Tony himself, his buddies were old-school, the kind of guys you could rely on in a pinch.

There was Mike Abernathy, a steel-eyed sixty-five-year-old former army combat commando badass, who looked as limber as a kid out of high school. Mike had done four tours in Vietnam, earned a chest full of medals, and at one time was even on the short list for a Medal of Honor.

Then there was Jonah Goldman, a fifty-year-old former Navy SEAL whose search-and-rescue missions around the globe were legendary, a guy who looked like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And finally, Doc Matson, former medic and paratrooper who had trained Tony himself. Grizzled, white haired, Doc was the oldest of the bunch, and possibly the toughest, and the others sometimes kidded that he’d fought alongside Ulysses S. Grant.

It was a motley crew, all right, but these men were as tough as they came and had the mental and physical prowess to best any twenty-year-old coming out of the box.